07/18/16 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our friend Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World, and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, a longtime foreign correspondent, regular writer for his own website, ericmargulies.com, lewrockwell.com, and also unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Eric?
Thank you, Scott.
Glad to be back with you.
Very happy to talk with you again, although, man, the subject matter today is something else, I'll tell you.
The end of last week, obviously, is the topic.
First of all, can we talk about, let's talk about the coup in Turkey first.
I guess, well, there's so many different angles.
I guess, could you just give us your basic thumbnail sketch of what you think happened, or what you think the audience most needs to know about the situation there?
Well, Turkey's a very murky, complex story, and even a lot of Turks don't understand it.
Here's the bottom line view.
Turkey's a big country.
It's 80 million people.
And within that are all kinds of factions and groups.
And up until President Erdogan was elected in 1991 or 2, Turkey was in constant chaos and turmoil, fighting between the extreme left and the extreme right, Turkish fascists, communists, and banking crises every week.
Turkey was an absolute mess.
Since Erdogan, with his AK Party, his AK Party, who voted in, made a miraculous transformation in Turkey, again, from the sick man of Europe and the chaotic man, into a thriving economic power, a thriving democracy, and pulled the country better than it's ever been since the Ottoman days.
So, that's it.
And a lot of people were jealous of the success.
Two basic groups in Turkey bitterly opposed the Islamist-lite AK Party of Erdogan.
And there was one, the traditional Kemalists, as they're known.
These were secular, Western-leaning oligarchs who wanted to have nothing to do with Islam, didn't want to be even seen as Turks, wanted a secular republic that's established by the modern dictator of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, wanted to crush Islam, drive it out, and hated anything to do with Islam, and also represented a very dug-in economic oligarchy there, which controlled industry, academia, the media, and, most important, the military.
Erdogan has pushed them out of, or back to their barracks, and this has been a struggle for over a decade.
The other group are the Gulenists.
I don't want to run on too long.
No, I want you to.
Okay.
The Gulenists, this is a really weird story, Scott.
There's this self-proclaimed holy man named Fethi Gulen, who's in his 70s, and he was an ally of Erdogan.
Turkey has these very powerful brotherhoods, as they're called.
They're called like Masonic Orders, whatever you want, that sort of operate under the radar, and his was very, very large, and it controlled a lot of the educational establishment, legal establishment, and was very influential in the media and in the military.
But he and Erdogan fell out, and this strange man, Gulen, fled to, of all places, rural Pennsylvania, where he has a large estate and runs sort of like a cult from there.
He has been at war, been trying to overthrow Erdogan, using his infiltrated sources in academia, in the military, in the press.
Apparently, according to what happened last week, it looked like a combination of Kemalist right-wing army officers who were facing reassignment or downgrading, and the Gulenists, who were out for Erdogan's scalp, tried to stage this coup, and it was a big fizzle.
Right.
Now, so, well, one of my main questions, I guess I got to get to first here on the follow-up, is what do you think about a possible U.S. role here, or at least the American reaction to the coup as it unfolded?
I would not like to think that the U.S. was involved in it, but I do have some dark suspicions that it's possible that there was some U.S. involvement.
In the past, before Erdogan's AK party took over, the army ran everything.
In fact, it hanged the father of one of my classmates years ago.
And the army ran everything, and they reported directly to the Pentagon.
There's no need for State Department or anything else.
They just called up the Pentagon in Washington and asked them, you know, what should we do?
It was, in this sense, very much like a typical Latin American army of the 1960s or 70s.
So they were close to the U.S.
The U.S. has a very important air base at Incirlik, you know, the far end of the country, which they used to bomb the Middle East.
And, by the way, where they were able to store 30 to 60 nuclear hydrogen bombs.
And there's intense antipathy towards Erdogan in the U.S. media and in U.S. ruling circles.
Neocons hate him because he has actually had the audacity to criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
So he's been marked for death by them.
The military is not happy with him.
The establishment is not happy.
Because, first of all, he's a Muslim, and that's already three strikes against him.
And, number two, he doesn't always follow instructions from Washington.
So that's put him in the doghouse, as far as a lot of the American media and thought merchants are concerned.
Yeah, it's quite a consensus.
And, well, and let's get back to more details about, you know, some of where he spins outside of his normal, you know, prescribed channels in a second.
But there was one thing I wanted to follow up, not to nitpick, but just to make sure I understood you right.
You said 1992.
And I just wondered if you were referring to his, you know, the very beginnings of his political career or if you meant to say 2002.
No, it was the beginnings of his political career.
Oh, I see.
I just wanted to make sure I understood that right.
What doldrums the country was in back then in the early 90s, and how he helped start turning that around even back then, you're saying?
He's performed a remarkable renaissance in Turkey, uplifting half of its people from poverty in almost Bolivia and in central Anatolia to an important status, making Turkey an industrial power, making it respected, and most of all, bringing stability to the political and economic process.
But then, okay, so it seems like, you know, where he spun out, I mean, you mentioned he criticized Israel, even stood up to them a little bit after the Mavi Mamara and all that.
And so, you know, that explains Michael Rubin's problem and why he was promoting regime change in Newsweek a couple of months ago, famous from the Office of Special Plans and the neocons there.
But, you know, I wonder, and this is something that we've talked about for a long time running now, it's sort of Kremlinology or whatever, but to what degree was Erdogan's support, I mean, and I think in this case, direct support for the Al-Nusra Front and at least indirect wink-nudge type support for the Islamic State that went on for years there.
How much of that was outside of Obama's program in Syria?
How much of that was, you know, was any of that what you're referring to when you say, you know, that the military and the establishment in America were getting sick of this guy?
Was it because Obama kind of had second thoughts about Syria, but he kept on?
No, Scott, I don't think so.
The Turkish intelligence directorate marches to its own tune and is very influential, but operates very subtly behind the scenes.
And the Turks said, well, look, the Americans are demanding that we do something to follow their position in Syria, but we have our own interests.
Sort of a little like Pakistan in Afghanistan.
You know, it says, yes, boss, yes, boss.
So the Americans, then it goes and does its own thing.
Turks did the same thing, and for the Turks, made a terrible mistake, in my view, in trying to join the lynch mob going against mild-mannered President Assad in Damascus.
Before the policy followed by even the Erdogan government was a no-problems policy.
Make nice to all of our neighbors.
And they did.
Things were very successful.
But then something happened, and Erdogan got beat in his bonnet about Assad and Syria, decided to overthrow him, and the Turkish intelligence agency was given a green light to start sending in rebels and Nusra Fronts, all kinds of crazies, and arming them.
Because that's where the supply lines for all these Syrian rebel groups run across the Turkish border.
So the Turks were playing kind of a crafty double game, which ended up blowing up in their faces.
Yeah.
I mean, they really, I mean, Phil Giraldi talked about being, I think, in Ankara and seeing ISIS fundraising guys, you know, out on the streets, you know, directly raising money for the Islamic State, and that would have been back in, I guess, 2014, as late as then.
But, yeah, they've had a recent major Islamic State attack, and I guess a couple more before that.
So they really have dropped that policy by now, huh?
Well, not 100%, but let's say 90%.
What they're doing now is ultra discreet.
Yeah.
So, you know, one of the things that people were saying about the coup was, Oh, look, Erdogan was saying he wanted to kiss and make up with the Russians and he wanted to kiss and make up with Assad, and then the coup comes.
But Phil Giraldi in his article says, Nah, if anything, they would, you know, the military would have liked that.
They're overthrowing him for causing trouble with the Russians and the Syrians this whole time, where they would have preferred that he had not.
I think a better reason is that in August, military ranks are being reviewed on a mass scale, and the promotions and demotions will be made as a typical military process.
And a lot of senior officers felt that they were not going to be made promotion and be forced to resign because of their ghoulinist or Kemalist sympathies, and that's when they decided to strike.
I think that was the key reason.
And what do you think about, I don't know if you've seen, Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Pat Lang, and some of these other former intelligence guys are saying, and Phil says in his article on the American Conservative Today, that at least what they're being told is that when Erdogan, he figured out that they were going for this coup, so he had senior officers tell them, Yeah, go ahead, we're with you.
But they really weren't.
They were loyal to the president.
But he went ahead and baited them into moving early in order to kind of nab them and then expand his power after the fact.
Well, that's one idea I've seen expressed.
The Turks, you know, are noted for subtlety and intrigue.
I remember the whole lot of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years was run out of the harem in Istanbul by a bunch of intriguing concubines, and they like that kind of stuff.
I said they're very subtle, the Turks, sometimes too subtle for their own good.
It's possible, but I don't think that this thing was cooked up by Erdogan.
Like I was thinking this morning of Mao's, what was it, the Thousand Flowers Blossom campaign, where he encouraged anybody who was opposed to government policies to step up to the plate and say it openly to people, and all the people who did got arrested and disappeared.
So, yes, it's possible, but I think there are simpler reasons for it, as I mentioned with the promotion thing and the fact that, you know, Erdogan's opponents hate his guts, and they failed totally to damage him in the polling process.
He wins every election, bigger and better and stronger.
And the only way they could do that was try and overthrow him, which they just did this last weekend.
Well, yes, speaking of intrigue and all that, they pretty much got caught, right, back in 2014, at least plotting.
They never did it, but it was leaked, their plot, to do a false flag attack on that shrine in Syria.
Oh, thank goodness.
It's sort of like protected, you know, almost like an embassy protected Turkish territory wholly inside Syria, and they're going to fake an attack on their own troops guarding it so as to have an excuse to invade, to protect it.
Heartwarming.
They must have learned that from the Pentagon.
Well, wait, we're going to get to that in a minute.
And then, of course, there was, you know, the red line and the rat line and the plot to arm up the al-Nusra Front with sarin gas in order to frame Bashar al-Assad back in August 2013.
That's right.
A complete disinformation campaign.
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All right, now, so this guy Gulen lives in Pennsylvania.
So doesn't that mean that this whole thing is a CIA job or what?
Well, I don't know.
I don't have any evidence one way or the other.
I have my suspicions, and I think yes.
I think the U.S. is using Gulen as a sort of secret weapon to use against Erdogan if he gets out of hand and if he becomes nonresponsive to Washington's demands.
What I find is interesting is that the Turks have been demanding his extradition for a long time to Turkey and for terrorism issues.
And the U.S. has refused to consider them.
Just yesterday, I think, John Kerry said that, well, okay, the U.S. would consider an extradition request if made properly and filled with facts and figures proving his terrorist attacks.
What's so interesting was in 2003, the U.S. wanted bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan, and demanded that the Afghans hand him over.
And the Afghans replied quite rightfully.
They said, fine, send us a legitimate extradition request with facts and figures, and we'll send him to a Muslim country with impartial judiciary.
Well, the Americans said no, and they went and invaded Afghanistan instead.
So on this precedent, the Turks might have a president to go and invade Pennsylvania and grab this guy.
Yeah, exactly.
Drone strikes coming to the Poconos soon.
All right, so now the rumor is at least that the Turkish commander of the Incirlik Air Base was placed under arrest, and for a while they laid siege to the place and turned off the power, which I guess the Americans still have auxiliary power there.
But the implication, I guess, and this could just be a PR stunt on Erdogan's part, right?
But the implication being that he was trying to blame the U.S. for what had happened there, right?
No?
Well, there is a strong feeling in Turkey, certainly within the government, but in the street as well, that the U.S. was behind this.
I mean, while the coup was underway, the American media reported it was dripping with schadenfreude and bad-mouthing Erdogan constantly.
I was amazed watching CNN.
They couldn't have been any more anti-Turkish than its worst enemies.
And it's almost as if the media had been prepped or given some kind of advance warning that something would happen.
Now let's get this guy out of here and put one of our guys in.
Yeah, especially on Fox.
They were ready.
Or, I don't know, ready, but they were excited anyway, that's for sure.
Yeah, they spilt blood.
Well, and you know, Kerry's original statement was something like, well, you know, who kind of prefers stability and continuity?
It didn't say a thing about the current elected government of the country at all.
It wasn't until, you know, I was following it on Twitter, as this is all developing, where it wasn't until about three hours into the coup when it was clearly failing and the president was on his way back to the airport to take control, and then Obama and Kerry had put out a thing that was supposedly a readout of their phone call where they agreed that, yes, this was a very bad thing indeed.
And they supported Chavez's retaking of power in the palace.
I mean, Erdogan's retaking of power in the palace.
But with support with faint praise.
What I also found particularly revolting was Kerry, who's not a bad guy, but came out and said, well, you know, we have cautioned Turkey to observe democratic principles and rule of law and don't crack down too hard on these people.
To be a democracy, you've got to be careful what you do.
Just down the Mediterranean is Egypt, a close American ally.
We helped overthrow the Morsi government in Egypt.
And the Egyptian military junta led by this awful little tinpot dictator, Field Marshal al-Sisi, as he styles himself, is not criticized at all.
They just shoot down demonstrators in the street and torture people and disappear them.
And that's hunky dory with Washington.
But Turks, you have to behave or else.
Yeah, Kerry called the 2013 coup in Egypt the restoration of democracy.
Yeah, that's really.
I don't know who's writing his lines for him.
Terry Gilliam, maybe.
Yeah, or or William Crystal.
Yeah, man.
All right.
So let's talk about France a little bit here.
I don't know how credible it is, but one anonymous leak from the press this morning was, oh, that the truck attacker there on Bastille Day in Nice, France, was growing his beard out.
And he'd been palling around with some political slash Islamic radicals.
And he had complained to a friend that why can't the Islamic State have some land anyway on the eve of this?
Then again, everything before that said that the guy, you know, was basically psychotic and was on heavy medication, not just Zoloft or something, but was on some pretty serious antipsychotic medication and had been divorced from his wife.
And I don't know.
You tell me what you make of all this.
I think it was one guy who just went screwy.
You know that every day in the United States now, some lunatic ones in a shed shooting people.
He just had a more original way of killing, which actually started in Palestine, where Palestinians who were enraged at the Israelis and reprisal would take their trucks or cars and drive them into groups of Israelis.
And this is exactly what this guy did.
His wife had just left him.
He lost his job.
He was psycho.
Yeah, the French government is now saying, well, we believe it's an act of terrorism.
Well, terrorism lets everybody off the hook.
You have no other responsibility.
Oh, it's terrorists and they're evil.
Kill them.
So and it is proclaimed that it's a war now with terrorism, which is not quite the case.
And the French government has just declared a state of war and is calling up reserve troops and beating the wardrobes.
This is, in my view, President Hollande's last desperate gasp at gaining some popularity.
I think he's down to about eight percent, which is include his relatives and his mother.
I mean, he's facing oblivion politically.
So as we know from our own American experience, screaming terrorism is the best way to reboot your fortunes.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
You know, it's I mean, everybody always tries to take this wrong, like it's somehow an excuse or anything like that.
But it seems to me, even if you take what they're saying now at face value, that it did have a, you know, Islamist political Islamic state bent to it.
Well, dang, isn't today the fifth anniversary of you reporting to me that the French were helping the Americans build a revolution in France?
And, you know, we're helping jihadists basically to try to overthrow Assad.
And then isn't it right now pretty much exactly the two year anniversary of you and me talking about how, oh, yeah, now that the Islamic state has grown from a group to a place, now America and France are going to stab them in the back and go to war against them.
This is the context of the entire thing.
So even if on the margin in this psycho's mind, an Islamic state motive finally helped push him over the edge that he was going to do this thing on behalf of them somehow or whatever it was still in the context.
Not that's justified, but it's still blowback from a French and American policy that did not have to be in Syria this whole time.
They chose to make that policy in Syria this whole time.
Eric, that's right, Scott.
But Americans don't understand this.
It's too deep and murky for them.
It's just they don't understand it.
And, you know, it's saying, oh, it's Islamic terrorists, possibly Islamic terrorists.
Well, you know, everybody from almost everybody from the Middle East are Muslims.
And anybody who commits an act of violence for political reasons or reasons of dementia or whatever, every suddenly it's terrorism.
Well, we have a huge growth industry in terrorism.
We have large sectors of the government which rely on it.
So it will go on.
We manufacture them like the FBI is doing in the states where they get these poor numbskulls and fill them up with musketele wine and coach them on what to say that they're Islamic terrorists.
Now that you've mentioned terrorists and the FBI, well, terrorists in the United States and the FBI, have you had a chance to read the 28 pages?
No, I haven't yet.
I've been so busy with the Turks and the French.
All I've seen are reports saying that there's nothing interesting in them.
Have you read it?
Oh, yeah.
Well, you can take that headline to the bank if you want to.
What I read in there was it basically is beyond dispute now that Prince Bandar himself was running the guys that crashed into the Pentagon.
The guys who were known by the CIA to have been co-conspirators in the Cole plot, which was forged at the same Malaysia meeting where the 9-11 plot was more or less finalized there.
The Saudi agents in San Diego helped these guys on every level.
We already knew quite a bit of this, but on every level, including putting them in the flight schools and all the money, money direct from Bandar, not just from his wife to the other guy's wife, but direct from Bandar to the bad guys.
And the whole context of them covering this up all in the year 2002 when they're busy lying us into war with Iraq, Eric.
Interesting.
Well, it's a hell of a thing.
I can't wait for your write-up on it once you read that thing.
I mean, here's my thing, and I'm totally going off in cuckoo land here.
I don't care, but I'll just go ahead and say it.
I got to wonder, why would Bandar do something like that?
He's going to stab Bush Jr., the son of his best buddy, Bush Sr., right in the chest?
Not even in the back, but right in the face?
And then he's going to smoke cigars with him on the Truman Balcony three days later?
Good question, Scott.
That's why I haven't gotten into it.
I haven't figured out what the plot is behind there.
Yeah, I don't know.
You know what?
Honestly, I don't want to read too much into it and say, well, between the lines, it's a 100% proven fact that Bandar knew exactly what these dudes were going to do.
I guess it's possible they were trying to recruit them as double agents to work for our side or the Saudi side inside al-Qaeda, but they got double-crossed or that kind of thing.
It's not all definitive, but I say just put Bandar up on the gallows and wrap the rope around his neck and see if he starts squealing.
He's a nasty guy.
And what about the Israelis who were tailing these?
That's not in there.
That's not in the 28.
Or the dancing Israeli moving men in Newark.
Well, we know that there's FBI reporting on that just from what they told Carl Cameron, that there is at least 302s, even if they never came up with anything to hand over to Congress.
They came up with something on that stuff, the FBI did.
I don't trust anybody.
We've had so much deceit and lying reporting in the media, the same thing out of Congress, that we have to be very skeptical of anything we get and anything that's declassified.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, for example, one of the things in there is that Abu Zubaydah had Prince Bandar's vacation phone number to his vacation house in Aspen.
Oops.
And yet – but we know about – at the time this thing was written, they assumed that Zubaydah was the number three man in al-Qaeda and a 9-11 co-conspirator, but actually that's not true, right?
He was somebody, but he was not loyal to bin Laden, he was not a high-level member of al-Qaeda.
Just caught up in the dragnet.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, it's interesting that he had Bandar's number, but it's not necessarily a link to the 9-11 plot at all there.
It's sort of a stray data point that looks like it could be something, I guess, but, you know, maybe not.
But anyway, sort of like with the WikiLeaks State Department cables and the military cables, yeah, the cable says a thing, so that's news that the cable says a thing.
But it doesn't mean that what the cable says is correct necessarily, depending on what it is.
There's all kinds of crap in there.
Good point.
Anyway, so listen, thanks for coming on the show and talking with me about this stuff.
I feel very privileged to have access to you, sir.
I'm delighted to be back with you on this important and interesting news story.
See you at the next Crisis, Scott.
Thanks again, Eric, appreciate it.
Okay, bye.
All right, y'all, that's our good buddy, Eric Margulies, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Those are the books, and find them at ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com, and unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com, for all his latest articles.
And I forgot the title, but his latest is about France, and it's a really good one.
We're going to run it tomorrow on antiwar.com.
Thanks, y'all, very much.
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